Creative Commons has created an interesting plugin for WordPress that permits to easily choose a specific icense for your website and publish it in the footer. We are working for improving it. I think it can be improved and these are my suggestions: add an explicative xhtml text template in the ...

Thanks to everyone who came out last week for the ccSalon in San Francisco (check out the photos), and a special thanks, as always, to our generous venue host, PariSoMa. We had a great turnout, and amidst the friendly mingling and tasty refreshments, we got to hear from three stellar presenters discussing CC, culture, history, and digital storytelling - and now you can hear them too!* Check out the presentations (via Blip.tv) from:

Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley
Dave Toole, CEO and Founder, Outhink Media
Nancy Van House, Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information

We’re currently planning our next salon for mid-August, so stay tuned: check back on our wiki or join our events mailing list.

* A big thanks to summer intern Lee-Sean Huang for his time and video editing skills!

ccLearn presented on CC and Open Educational Resources at the WhippleHill User Conference yesterday in Boston. WhippleHill Communications is a company that started off more or less building websites for schools. As the Internet evolved, so did WhippleHill’s business model into a service one meeting schools’ online communication needs. WhippleHill targets independent high schools and is a for-profit. However, like a lot of companies who offer services around next generation web technologies, they promote open content and tools for their clients. They also host an annual user conference where they invite cutting edge initiatives to lead sessions on new media and technologies pertinent to the changing world. ccLearn had the opportunity to lead one of these sessions entitled, “Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources: How the world is changing and what you need to know to keep up” targeted mainly at education around CC and copyright for high school students.

The slide show is up under CC BY (except otherwise noted). We would like to acknowledge Jessica Coates’ slide show “Creative Commons in the Classroom” from which we co-opted some great slides!

Thanks again to WhippleHill and its President, Travis Warren, for the strong support!

L'AIDRO (Associazione Italiana per i Diritti di Riproduzione delle Opere dell’ingegno) ha recentemente (08/06/2009) emesso il comunicato stampa Creative commons oltre gli usi gratuiti. Secondo il comunicato, grazie al protocollo CCPlus ed allo scambio di repertori tra AIDRO e la società di gestione statunitense CCC (Copyright Clearing Center), gli autori italiani hanno a disposizione un nuovo strumento per la gestione dei diritti di sfruttamento commerciale sulle loro opere rilasciate tramite licenze CC e che includano l'elemento NC (Non-Commerciale).

leggi tutto

Danes je v reviji Pravna praksa izšel članek sodelavke pri projektu CC Slovenija Maje Lubarda o obveznem kolektivnem upravljanju z naslovom Ali obvezno kolektivno upravljanje avtorskih pravic omejuje avtorje?, ki med drugim govori tudi predlogih sprememb ZASP, ki jih je pripravil CC Slovenija.

Povezave:
* Revija Pravna praksa, št. 26, 2.7.2009
* članek

Koordinates makes CC datasets by Ministry for the Environment available online.

As of July 1, WisconsinView, an effort to make available a variety of types of imagery for the state of Wisconsin, will make their data available in the public domain via CC0. This news was brought to us by Puneet Kishor, a Science Commons fellow.

From the press release:

“Since 2004, WisconsinView  has made aerial photography and satellite imagery of Wisconsin available to the public for free over the web. As part of the AmericaView consortium, WisconsinView supports access and use of these imagery collections through education, workforce development, and research. Starting June 30, 2009, WisconsinView is making available all of its more than 6 Terabytes of imagery data under the new CC0 Protocol provided by Creative Commons. The CC0 (pronounced CC-Zero) Protocol waives any rights in a dataset, ensuring that all of the dataset is available to anyone without encumbrance of any kind. More information on CC0 is available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0, and the reasoning behind the protocol is described here. Further questions about WisconsinView may be directed to Dr. Sam Batzli, Director, WisconsinView at sabatzli@wisc.edu or Puneet Kishor, Science Commons Fellow (Geospatial Data) at punkish@creativecommons.org.”

We applaud Batzli and Kishor for their ongoing work in making information available to the public and dedicating such a rich resource to the public domain.

Twin sister pop-rock act Carmen and Camille recently launched a very cool CC remix project with Indaba Music. They’ve made the audio stems from their previously unreleased song “Shine 4U” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and are encouraging people to use them in new songs. Since the stems are under CC’s most permissive license, you’re free to not only share but also sell and commercially license your remix, as long as you give the duo credit for supplying the source material.

The sisters, whose music has been featured on MTV’s TRL and who have licensed many of their tracks to shows such as The Hills, worked closely with Indaba on the project. Says vocalist/guitarist Camille, in the project’s press release:

“I think what makes us most excited about the outcome of this campaign is getting to hear our song redone in many different ways. We can’t wait to hear what people can add to the track. And the new versions of the song may bring us new fans that it would have taken us a long time to reach, which is great.”

We think these two have the right idea!

Upload your remix to Indaba Music through July 21st, 2009. Winners will be announced on August 14th; prizes include Camel Audio software, Sennheiser headphones, and pro memberships to Indaba Music.

Indaba tells us that entries are currently at the rate of about 1,000 per week, which means there’s a huge amount of music being created that will be available for all kinds of uses under the CC license that Cameron and Camille chose. We’d love to hear from anyone who ends up selling or commercially licensing their remix - if this applies to you, please shoot us a note at press@creativecommons.org.

This past December, I conducted a series of interviews with people about the value of sharing information and resources in their respective fields of work. The interviews were edited into a podcast for GOOD entitled “We Like to Share” that was made available to people who attended the GOOD December series of events in Los Angeles. Last week, GOOD began posting CC BY-licensed text versions of the interviews on its website and will roll out one a week over the next few months. The first interview is with Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, who was the online strategist for the Barack Obama campaign. Check back at “We Like to Share” each Thursday (starting tomorrow) to read interviews with iconic sharers like Jimmy Wales, Chris Dibona, Frances Pinter, Jesse Dylan, and Curt Smith.

I am a terrible poster boy for web 2.0 — I’ve spent a lot more time working to protect it than actually using it.  But recent experiences giving a lecture in Britain convinced me that Twitter really could be useful so I decided to take the plunge.  I am now “thepublicdomain” http://twitter.com/thepublicdomain

Mark my words, it will be car phones and electric typewriters next…

I am on Radio West today, talking about a subject far from intellectual property — the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, the subject of a novel that I wrote two years ago, called The Shakespeare Chronicles. 

For those who are interested, I have also included the brief I wrote when I was Shakespeare’s “lawyer” in a mock trial called In Re Shakespeare in front of three Supreme Court Justices.  (I got the verdict but Justice Stevens has since declared that he thinks Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford.)  If you’d like to see a fragment of me presenting the oral argument in that debate — and being cross examined by Justice Stevens –  there is a small video excerpt on Youtube.  (Note the nice ducktail haircut — what can I say, it was the late 80’s.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

“知识共享”，一种倡导合法共享、“保留一些权利”的知识产权实现方式。 “中医医学”，中华民族独有的医学文化。 前者2006年刚刚正式登陆中国大陆，而后者早已伴随中华民族数千年的风雨历程。中医，既被视为一种独特的诊疗方式也是一个充满象征意义的文化符号。出现在新石器时代晚期充满神秘色彩的东方古国的她，以自身的显著疗效在现代社会与西方医学不断进行着博弈。 为了促使中医药非物质文化遗产得到更好的传承与保护，展示中医文化悠久的历史，弘扬我国优秀传统文化，促进中西方文化的交融，促使中医传统文化资源合法有序在世界范围共享与传承，由中国人民大学法学院主办，知识共享中国大陆项目、孔伯华国医学堂协办，“知识共享与非物质文化遗产保护之中医文化的传承论坛”将于2009年7月4日（星期六）下午14:00至17:30在中国人民大学明德法学楼601国际学术报告厅举行。 届时，来自法律界、中医界和传媒界等领域的人士将汇聚一堂，围绕“知识共享与非物质文化遗产保护”这一主题进行深入探讨。原最高人民法院知识产权庭庭长、国家法官学院蒋志培教授，孔伯华国医学堂创办人孔令谦先生，北京中医药大学黄作镇教授，原国家中医药管理局办公室主任王凤岐教授，知识共享中国大陆项目主任、中国人民大学法学院王春燕教授将分别从各自实务和研究领域出发进行主题演讲；由法学教授、医学专家、文化学者、传媒人士共同参与的嘉宾讨论环节将通过跨领域的思想碰撞和观点交流，为“中医文化的传承”这一经典命题带来无限启迪；更有十余位老中医亲临活动现场，以数十载的从医经历和理念为我们诠释“上医治国，中医治人，下医治病”的永恒真谛。相信这一交流过程定会为我们带来一场颇具启发性的思想和文化盛宴。 在本次论坛上，由化学工业出版社出版的中国大陆第一部采用知识共享协议的著作——《孔伯华中医世家医学传习录》，也将正式发布。届时，该书作者孔令谦先生和化学工业出版社俸培宗社长将共同为该书揭幕。这将使人们直接感受到经典的“中医文化”借助目前国际上通行的著作权行使方式——“知识共享”（Creative Commons）—— 去实现广泛的传播。 主题：2009“知识共享与非物质文化遗产保护”之“中医文化的传承”论坛 时 间：2009年7月4日下午14：00 – 17：30（星期六） 地 点：中国人民大学法学院 601国际学术报告厅 主 办 单 位：中国人民大学法学院 协 办 单 位：知识共享中国大陆项目、孔伯华国医学堂 支 持 单 位：化学工业出版社 资 助 单 位：福特基金会 请点击下载论坛日程。

在Commons News有一則新聞：英國政府出版品辦公室做了一項公眾對於授權詞彙認知的行為關係研究，其中71%的受訪者認為政府應該朝向鼓勵再利用這些著作。研究中分別以 Copyright 、 Crown Copyright 、 Click-Use Licence 、 Read Terms & Conditions 等不同意涵的授權詞彙去詢問受訪者，是否影響其使用意願。 報告中發現約有70%的受訪者看到「Copyright」這個詞彙時，會大大降低使用意願。整體研究所呈現出的結果，不難發現當詞彙中隱含額外金錢交易或是額外動作時，就會降低人們使用它的動機。不過，此項研究的詞彙分類，似乎稍嫌不夠細緻，如公共領域（Public domain）以及創用CC這類的公眾授權方式，並沒有獨立的來分析，所以無法清楚公共領域、創用CC這些字樣是否有助於鼓勵大家去使用著作。 新聞中也提到受訪者中有87%的人不認識創用CC授權中姓名標示的圖示，但是這只是初步的印象調查，而這項調查未來仍會持續進行。另外，本篇新聞的作者提到希望以後在測試創用CC授權詞彙認知時，應該將授權標示的圖樣與說明文字放在一起，因為該新聞作者認為創用CC授權在採用以及散佈時，大多都會將圖示以及人類讀的懂的文字一塊置放。...

In case you missed it, last Friday UNESCO published “Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace”, three years worth of documentation surrounding the UNESCO OER Community. From their announcement,

“Since 2005, UNESCO has been at the forefront of building awareness about this movement by facilitating an extended conversation in cyberspace. A large and diverse international community has come together to discuss the concept and potential of OER in a series of online forums.

The background papers and reports from the first three years of discussions are now available in print. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace provides an overview of the first steps of this exciting new development: it captures the conversations between leaders of some of the first OER projects,and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress.”

You can access the online edition at their wiki, licensed CC BY-NC-SA. You can also buy a print edition.

Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at the Intellectual Property Law Research Unit (IPLRU) at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town. Tobias Schonwetter, a post doctoral fellow at the IPLRU, has taken over as legal lead from Andrew Rens. Tobias will join public lead Dave Duarte, in [...]

Last week, in Amsterdam, approximately 70 people from around the world gathered in one big room to discuss the current state of affairs in open translation. We discussed open-source translation software, open and volunteer translation communities, openly licensed works – both translated and for translating, open databases for machine translation, and the intersection of translation with open education, open video, open business practices, and more.

It was a whirlwind of a time, and it was clear that everyone was excited about the pace of development and the promise of open translation for building cultural bridges, facilitating the free exchange of ideas, and empowering those who are not able to participate in the current linguistically and technologically dominant paradigms. Look for additional information on host Aspiration Tech’s site, and check out the new manual on open translation tools which was generated by a book sprint immediately following the conference.

If this meeting was any indication, we suspect that the benefits of permitting translations (through the application of an appropriate CC license, for example) will quickly be matched with both software and communities poised to leverage those permissions. Can we imagine a world where the language of origin serves to authenticate communications rather than hampering them?

“Dilema en Serie“ es un disco de libre descarga y licenciado por Creative Commons, que compila nueva música de miembros o amigos del colectivo Dilema Industria. La mayoría de los participantes acaban de estrenar material, o preparan nuevos trabajos para este año, y entre ellos se encuentran Dadalú, Tonossepia y Como Asesinar a Felipes.

Hoy, martes 30 de junio en el Bar Constitución (Constitución #61, Barrio Bellavista, Santiago) a las 21 hrs. y de manera gratuita, se viene una nueva fecha del ciclo Noa Noa Edición Netlabels. Y se viene con todo, pues uno de los netlabels más reconocidos de la escena nacional, Pueblo Nuevo, celebra su cuarto aniversario en esta ocasión. Y parece que tira la casa por la ventana. Al menos así adelantan en un comunicado de prensa:

Abriremos la tocata con la presentacion de Mika Martini, quien abordara el camino de la musica experimental, con una improvisacion a partir de grabaciones de campo, vocoder y samples, los cuales seran manipulandos, grabados y reproducidos en tiempo real. Posteriormente, Daniel Jeffs nos mostrara un adelanto de su proximo disco, donde fiel a su estilo ligado al minimal, ahora le introduce mayor cantidad de elementos bailables por medio de maquinas de ritmo y hardware dedicado. Luego, nuestro “super bajado” artista Francisco Pinto, nos deleitara con un set compuesto por temas de sus discos “Warm Milk” y “Boo Boo”, mas material nuevo de corte house-electro-dance que estara disponible en su proximo EP “Cherry” que lanzaran los colegas de Epa_sonidos en Julio. Finalizaremos con la presentacion de Sokio, quien nos agasajara con todo el beat, la favela funk y el electro de su disco “Columbia”, mas todo lo que sea necesario para celebrar la ocasion como se debe. En las visuales tendremos a nuestro colaborador habitual y “VJ oficial”: Oktopus.tv, quien ilustrara esta cantidad de ondas sonoras con el talento de su “live cinema”.

Bonus: Para quienes lleguen temprano tendremos chapitas conmemorativas para regalar; estara seguramente un nuevo disco de libre descarga disponible… y esperamos brindarles alguna sorpresa de ultimo minuto! Asi que estan todos invitados, no se lo pierdan!

Además, en la web de Noa Noa puedes encontrar una completa entrevista a Mika Martini, uno de los fundadores de Pueblo Nuevo, donde cuenta el papel que han tenido las licencias Creative Commons en su sello.

-¿Qué beneficios te trajo a ti y a los otros participantes de Pueblo Nuevo publicar sus trabajos bajo licencias Creative Commons?

-En estos cuatro años de corta pero intensa trayectoria, creo que los habitantes de Pueblo Nuevo hemos obtenido múltiples beneficios, cantidad de buenas experiencias y satisfacciones. Sin ir más lejos, hemos obtenido dos veces un premio Qwartz a la creación electrónica. Este año 2009, el disco Minimental de Pirata (alias de Antonio Díaz), licenciado bajo CC, ganó la categoría “Qwartz Descubrimiento” y le permitió a Antonio viajar una semana a París, Francia, con todos los gastos pagados, para recibir el reconocimiento del público, de la organización y de los demás artistas electrónicos que estaban en el evento. Pero más allá de estos casos excepcionales, la difusión de los discos que hemos editado ha permitido dar a conocer el trabajo de colegas y músicos desconocidos por el público, ya sea por lejanía geográfica o por estilo, como es el caso de los magallánicos Lluvia Ácida, el maestro Gustavo Becerra o el danés Lars from Mars, por nombrar sólo algunos de los más recientes. Creo que haber optado por Creative Commons nos permite ser parte de un movimiento global, del cual nos sentimos comprometidos: la cultura libre.

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow points readers to Snitchtown: The Photo Essay, a wonderful adaptation of his essay, Snitchtown. Originally a CC BY-NC-SA licensed editorial on “the future of urban surveillance” - specifically the ubiquity of CCTV cameras found in the the UK - the new work, authored by Emma Byrne, is a photo essay that puts images alongside Doctorow’s words, specifically photos of CCTV cameras. Naturally, it is CC BY-NC-SA licensed as well.

These stories are inspiring for us as they show our licenses at work doing excatly what we intended them to - helping facilitate interesting and poignant reuse that make the original work richer. Even better is Doctorow’s reaction:

This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it’s the first adaptation that I prefer to my original.

A free PDF download of Snitchtown: The Photo Essay is available here.

Gubernator Kalifornii Arnold Schwarzenegger ogłosił inicjatywę, która otwiera drogę dla wolnych i cyfrowych podręczników w tym stanie. Kryzys okazał się być w tym wypadku pozytywną motywacją do przyspieszenia procesu, który był już w toku od 2002 roku. W ciągu ostatnich kilku lat starano się uruchomić program przeznaczony do oceny i ...

Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju ogłosiło konkurs na stworzenie platformy dla sieciowych zasobów wiedzy, edukacji i otwartego społeczeństwa wiedzy" - projekt będzie realizowany w ramach programu badawczego „Interdyscyplinarny system interaktywnej informacji naukowej i naukowo technicznej”. Jednym z zadań jest: "Analiza modeli prawnych zapewniających możliwie szerokie wykorzystanie zasobów, przy poszanowaniu praw autorskich ich ...

If you’re reading the Creative Commons blog, chances are you’re aware of the fact that the United States federal government is not entitled to copyright protection for their works. If you didn’t know this, check out the Wikipedia article on the subject, or some of our past blog posts on the subject. This means that federal works are essentially in the public domain.

What you may not know is that works of American states, in contrast to works of the federal government, are actually entitled to copyright protection under U.S. law. This creates the very awkward consequence of states automatically holding copyright in the very state laws, rules and court decisions that bind their citizens, not to mention other types of content created by its employees who are paid from public coffers filled in part by their taxpayers. CC is not alone (check out legendary archivist Carl Malamud and his public.resource.org project for more info) in believing that all such works should belong to the public and reside in the public domain.

Needless to say, we think this is an enormous opportunity for proper application of our legal tools to free up state works.

This is why its exciting to see the New York State Senate adopt a Creative Commons License for the content on their website. The photos and text of NYSenate.gov are now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, and 3rd party content, such as comments and user submitted photos are available under our Attribution license. Furthermore, the Senate has used our CC+ protocol to allow all other uses (even commercial ones and non-attribution ones) of the content so long as it is not for political fund raising purposes. In other words, if you’re not doing political fund raising you’re allowed to do whatever you want with the content.

While this is a somewhat novel approach to using our licenses, and indeed grants citizens rights to works they don’t currently have, it is only the first step. In the future, CC would love to see more states pushing their work into the public domain (and their policies into synchronicity with those of the federal government), for example by using our public domain waiver, CC0.

If you know of a state using CC licenses, add it to our wiki page on government uses of CC, or just let us know.

Senators Lieberman and Cornyn have reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373), which would require agencies with large research budgets to develop public access plans to make the peer reviewed journal articles reporting the results of research funded by these agencies publicly accessible over the Internet. In essence, this bill would take a large step toward generalizing the principle established by the NIH Public Access Policy. This is great news. For more information about what you can do to support the bill, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access page.

Creative Commons Korea and KAIST Graduate School of Culture Technology entered into bilateral collaborative relationship by signing an MOU on June 24.

 

GSCT is established with the intent to emphasize inter-disciplinary studies among technology, arts, business and design. And its curriculum is well customized to educate prospective leaders with the knowledge and skills covering the fields of developing science and technology that will develop the culture industry in Korea.

As of now, KAIST GSCT is to open its various academic content and research materials created by the graduate school to the public under CC licenses, building an archive site designed for it. Additionally, both parties agree to work together in multifaceted directions including the followings:

• Holding a series of seminars on the subjects related to sharing creative work on a regular basis 
• Exchanging personnel in research projects and other activities 
• Opening CC Korea sessions within KIST GSCT educational programs like Youth CT Experience Center

By taking coming projects with KAIST GSCT as a momentum, Creative Commons Korea hopes to see other domestic academic entities come together in making academic content open to facilitate free flow of ideas and information to create greater values for the Korean society as a whole.

Sincerely, CC Korea would like to extend gratitude to KIST GSCT for the opportunity for this partnership.

 

Yesterday the Register posted an article by Charles Eicher on the topic of copyfraud — asserting copyright where it doesn’t exist, or asserting more restrictions than copyright grants. A very important topic — true copyfraud diminishes the commons, either in the sense of propertizing the public domain, or effectively reducing the scope of uses not restricted by copyright.

Unfortunately, the article merely uses this interesting and important topic as a jumping off point for hyperbole. On the public domain and copyfraud, comments on the article offer far more insight than the article itself.

Eicher has in the past called advocates of Creative Commons “freetards”. Apparently he finds name calling more interesting than research, for on the third page of his copyfraud article he demonstrates willful ignorance on the topic of Creative Commons:

Now Creative Commons seeks expanded authority to administer the Public Domain, by issuing a “Creative Commons Public Domain License,” as if it was a sublicense of its own invention. Creative Commons is trying to expand its licensing authority over not just newly created works, but all public domain works.

Creative Commons does not have any “authority to administer” the public domain, whatever that means. Our public domain tools are not licenses — there is no “Creative Commons Public Domain License”. CC0 is a waiver that allows a copyright holder, to the extent possible, to release all restrictions on a copyrighted work worldwide. The Public Domain Certification facilitates clearly marking works already in the public domain as such. We also don’t have “licensing authority” over newly created works. All of our tools are voluntary and have an over-arching goal of expanding the commons, more specifically the public domain in the case of CC0 (as much as possible) and the Public Domain Certification (the effective public domain, by making existing public domain works more clearly marked, including with metadata, making them more available and discoverable).

Public domain licensing is still not available to any Flickr user. This forces everyone, from individuals to large public institutions, to contribute their works to the “Flickr Commons” under a CC license, even if the works are clearly in the public domain. Flicker is enacting a blatant power grab on behalf of Creative Commons. They are establishing an extra-legal licensing monopoly, imposing an illegal copyright license structure on free works. And this is the most pernicious effect of copyfraud: it exploits the public domain to aggregate monopoly power for private interests.

Except for the first sentence (regarding which, Creative Commons encourages Flickr to offer a public domain option for all users) all of the above paragraph is blatantly false. Images part of Flickr Commons are not under any CC license. The site’s easily accessible usage statement says No known copyright restrictions. Ideally the site might use a more affirmative public domain assertion, but it is impossible to characterize the statement as a CC license or as copyfraud.

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,

“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”

A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”

Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”

The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.

On May 26th, 2009, on Yahoo’s Search Blog, Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai announced the addition of CC license image filtering options to their image search and also explained why CC licenses are so important for finding images online. Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it ...

Creative Commons has created an interesting plugin for WordPress that permits to easily choose a specific icense for your website and publish it in the footer. We are working for improving it. I think it can be improved and these are my suggestions: add an explicative xhtml text template in the ...

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. This migration would be a huge boost ...

Domas Mituzas writes in an extremely nice post: It takes time to understand one is ‘creative commoner’. I do have a t-shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes… He tells stories of the joy of ...

Creative Commons is launching the second and final round of a survey intended to collect information on how people understand the term “noncommercial use”. As previously announced, this study is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and we are fortunate to have the help of a distinguished group of ...

On 4th April 2009, WFMU celebrated the launch of its new website, The Free Music Archive, open to the public in its beta version. From FMA’s Jason Sigal: Every track [on the FMA] will be offered in high-quality without restrictions, registration, advertisements or fees. Many grant additional rights under Creative Commons agreements, ...

The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of Lawrence Lessig last book, Remix, is now Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC). You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page.

The Creative Commons international community has organized two Technology Summits in 2008 — one in Mountain View, CA in June and one in Cambridge, MA in December. The third CC Technology Summit will take place June 26, 2009 in Turin, Italy at Politecnico di Torino. This is just ...

Creative Commons are looking for a few good souls to intern this summer. Here's the link.

Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create an archive of free, high quality 3D and CAD files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy: Unlike ...

En el marc de les jornades de programari lliure d’enguany, el proper dimecres 1 de juliol a les 10 del matí, la Kaitlin Thaney, project manager de Science Commons, oferirà una conferència amb el títol “Knowledge sharing in the sciences”. Posteriorment hi haurà una taula rodona per parlar de coneixement lliure amb la participació de [...]

The keynote speech by Denis Noble (Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, University of Oxford) will deal with the new conceptual foundations and the structure of global collaborations, particularly addressing the “meeting of Biology, Mathematics and Computation”.
Having broken the human organism down into his smallest components, the 25,000 genes and maybe 100,000 proteins, biology of the 21st century faces the challenge of how to put it all back together again. The Human Physiome Project aims to do this, using collaborations worldwide between mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, engineers, biochemists, physiologists and even experts from the social sciences. The challenge is vastly greater than sequencing the genome. It raises big questions on the conceptual foundations of biology, and it requires unusual forms of collaboration. The analysis will first explain the principles of this area of science and then describe how the collaborations have been established to make it possible.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [26june09]

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We thought those interested in public access to government data would be interested in this document put together by the Australia Bureau of Statistics, Informing the Nation - Open Access to Statistical Information in Australia. It was written as a submission to the Conference of European Statisticians run by the United Nations Statistical Commission and the Economic Commission for Europe in March this year.

It provides a great explanation of the history of their decision to make their main data resources available free for reuse by the public, which culminated in them applying a CC Attribution licence to their website in late 2008. It includes the details of their pricing policies, how they filtered their documents before release and their implementation strategy. But most importantly from our point of view, it provides an explanation of their reasons for using CC licensing, including an analysis of the appropriateness of the licences for government data and the value they can add to public resources.

Enjoy!
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한국과학기술원(KAIST) 문화기술대학원과 업무협약 체결

지난 24일, CC Korea와 한국과학기술원(KAIST) 문화기술대학원의 업무협약식이 문화기술대학원에서 있었습니다.

문화기술대학원에서는 CCL을 기반으로 KAIST 내의 저작물에 대한 아카이빙 사이트를 구축하여 KAIST내의 다양한 학술 컨텐츠와 자료를 오픈하기로 하였습니다.

뿐만 아니라 저작물의 공유와 관련한 주제에 대한 정기 세미나 개최, 연구 및 활동을 위한 인적 교환 및 교류, KAIST에서 행하는 청소년문화기술체험센터 등의 교육 프로그램에 CC Korea 섹션의 개설 등 다양한 사업을 협력하기로 합의하였습니다.

한국과학기술원(KAIST) 문화기술대학원과의 다양한 프로젝트를 시작으로 국내의 학술 컨텐츠가 누구에게나 오픈 되어서 지식이 공유되는 문화가 국내에도 형성될 것으로 기대됩니다.

한국과학기술원(KAIST) 문화기술대학원에 감사의 말씀을 드립니다.

Fundacja Nowe Media organizuje konkurs dla nauczycieli na stworzenie scenariusza lekcji dotyczącego nowych mediów, w trzech kategoriach: Współczesne problemy prawa autorskiego. Czy prawo radzi sobie z rozwojem technologii i społeczeństwa sieciowego? Gry (komputerowe, choć nie tylko). Czy mogą być nowym atrakcyjnym środowiskiem dla edukacji? Dziennikarstwo internetowe. Jak zrozumieć media poprzez ich tworzenie? Jak ...

Jerome H. Reichman (Duke University Law School) will explain how today's research community in a Microbial field which is outgrowing its “small science” institutional structures, must increasingly come to terms with commoditizing pressures within developed economies.
These pressures restrict the conduct of public-sector research through strong intellectual property rights and related contractual restrictions on access to and use of materials, publications, and data. At the same time, restrictive policies in developing countries under the Convention on Biodiversity complicate research uses of microbial materials held in public repositories ex situ, and make it increasingly difficult to access the vast in situ materials these countries control.
These trends have led to a proliferation of diverse licensing strategies and techniques, which collectively have elevated the transaction costs and other barriers for even relatively simple cooperative research projects. In order to avoid such obstacles, the research community goal is to use liability rules to promote the exchange of materials: the redesigning a “soft” infrastructure able to better manage publicly funded research resources, without compromising downstream commercial applications and fruitful partnerships between the public and private sectors, or between developed and developing countries.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [25june09]

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There's an interesting tweet about attribution in the data web. And it raises a tension I run into a lot but haven't seen a lot written about: the shifting nature of what the word "attribution" means.

We have a fairly common understanding of attribution in our daily lives: credit where credit is due is mine, and it tends to be what most people think. This is whether one is a musician, a scientist, a teacher, or anyone who does creative or innovative work. We like getting credit for our work. No problem there.

This idea of attribution encompasses the idea that we should get credit for our ideas. That if I'm the first one to realize that a certain gene knockout cures death, that the idea is linked to me forever. Like we link Watson and Crick to the DNA discovery. In this sense, attribution is very similar to the scholarly concept of citation.

However, the word "attribution" in a copyright license is a different beast. It even has a different wikipedia entry (which I did not create, and have not edited, despite my temptation!). I don't like the first sentence a lot, because it's not clear that in copyrights, attribution is something that gets triggered by the making of a copy - not by the use of the ideas in the copyrighted work.

This is the thing about the law. It's narrow in a lot of places. And it's often not what we think it is. Mainly because it was written by lawyers, not regular people.

Let's look at the legal code of the Creative Commons Attribution license. It's interesting.

The license grants the following rights:

- to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections;
- to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";
- to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,
- to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

See? It's about reproducing the work, adapting the work, and distribution. I don't need these rights to read a work, or study a data set, and take the ideas in the work or the data set. I only need them to make copies and derivatives. The law doesn't allow ideas or facts to be covered by copyright. But don't take it from me, take it from the US Government:

"Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed."

Now, because copyright doesn't protect these things, "attribution" in the sense of the license doesn't apply to ideas or facts either. Those rights above are conditional on my compliance with the terms of the license. Section 4 of the legal code lays out those conditions. If I fail to provide proper attribution, I lose the right to make and distribute copies and derivatives. I do NOT lose the right to "steal" the ideas in the article and claim them my own, because those ideas are not subject to copyright, and cannot be made subject to the attribution requirement.

This is where understanding that to the law, attribution is a very specific term of art, which is very different from what we think casually and commonly. Citation is much closer to the way we think than what is enabled in public copyright licenses or, for that matter, private copyright licenses.

This is why we recommend waiving attribution in the Science Commons protocol for open access to data. It's a narrow legal term that can screw with interoperability, while at the same time failing to provide what people really want, which is credit where credit is due.

Puneet Kishor, one of our fellows, got it right. We shouldn't use the law to make it hard to do the wrong thing. We should use technology to make it easy to do the right thing.

When it comes to data, and in particular to data interoperability, enabling citation and provenance that is easy to track and cite will serve the scientific goals far better than an attempt to port open source "principles" into a world where they fundamentally don't fit.

Read the comments on this post...

It’s here again. Our monthly CC Salon + Open Everything Berlin event is on for this Thursday, June 25, and this time we’re talking about Open Governance.

How do open concepts translate into the political sphere? To what extent is democracy fueled by values such as transparency, access, and participation? What do open source projects teach us about other fields of governance?

The fifth CC Salon + Open Everything Berlin takes place within Seitensprünge, a Berliner event series about political communication. Speaking at the salon is CC Germany’s Public Project Lead Markus Beckedahl, whose seasoned blog coverage is keeping the public abreast of Germany’s dawning internet censorship and other pressing political topics. Also joining us is Klas Roggenkamp from the German political discussion forum Wahl.de and media expert Ute Pannen, who will share commentary on open strategies used during the Obama’s campaign. We’ll also be hearing from Sebastian Sooth, who is reporting on open.nysenate.gov, a project with the New York State to give users direct access to its government data through APIs and original software.

Looks like we’ve got a lot of good topics ahead. Hope to see you there!

When: Thursday, 25.06.09, 20:00h

Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, 10117 Berlin Mitte

This afternoon the Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee of the Victorian Government handed down the final report of its Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data. And it’s great news for CC - not only does the Committee recommend that Victorian public agencies adopt a uniform licensing system, they recommend that CC be used as the default licences for that system.

The report is particularly timely for the Victorian government. The bushfires disaster earlier this year revealed how closed and outdated government information management policies can be a real barrier to coordination and response in a national emergency.
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The recommendation doesn’t mean, of course, that everything from the Victorian government would necessarily be released under CC. There are always going to be materials that are more appropriate for more closed copyright models for privacy, public safety and commercial reasons. But the Committee does endorse evidence (provided by the GILF project) that 85% of government documents would be appropriate for CC licensing.

We haven’t finished reading the report yet, so we can give you a full rundown. But here are the relevant recommendations:

• Recommendation 11: That the Victorian Government develop a consistent copyright licensing system for use across all government
  departments

• Recommendation 14: That the Victorian Government adopt the Creative Commons licensing model as the default licensing system for the Information Management Framework.

• Recommendation 15: That the Victorian Government adopt a hybrid public sector information licensing model comprising Creative Commons and a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.

If Victoria implements these recommendations, they’ll be in good company: President Obama, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation all already use CC licences for their material. Hopefully the Federal Government’s new Web 2.0 Taskforce will sit up and take notice of the Victorian report.

Hans F. Hoffmann, Geneva's CERN honorary member, will discuss the “Open, global collaborations in particle physics”.
A new project at CERN will create matter and observe it as it existed very close to the violent developments immediately after the big bang. This requires apparatus of unprecedented complexity, invented, elaborated, built, operated and exploited by global collaborations over decades and served by global e-infrastructures, also produced in the context.
Common clear objectives, mutual respect, complete sharing of all available knowledge, know-how, and necessary technologies within the collaborations, critical mass, flat hierarchies, rigorous quality assurance and the pledge of best efforts by the participating scientific institutes and funding agencies are the important ingredients of such collaborations.
They are brought to life by a continuous, (self-) structured and “accessible to all” communication at all levels. While immediate gainful applications are not the first priority, the collaborative model presented and implemented in this project can be applied to other large efforts and great challenges.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [24june09]

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We wanted to give big thanks to Ben, Dean, Elizabeth, Adi, and all the volunteers to helped make the fantastic Open Video Conference happen. Myself, Jane and Alex K were all in attendance on behalf of CC and we figured we’d post a wrap up about our experience at the conference.

At the CC Salon NYC / OVC Pre-party, I was able to record my conversation with Brett Gaylor, the director and creator of RiP! A Remix Manifesto which also screened at OVC. You can download our interview in ogg here, or mp3 here, available under a our Attribution license. Fans of Adam McHeffey will be happy to watch a YouTube video of his performance here. And last but not least, thanks to Erik Möller from the Wikimedia Foundation for guiding us through Wikipedia’s switch to CC-BY-SA.

And of course, we couldn’t forget about Blip.tv for supplying the beer at the salon, For Your Imagination Studios for the space, and Parker and Wesley for helping out with setup and breakdown. We couldn’t have done it without you guys!

As for the OVC itself, we were blown away with the focus and intensity in every panel and session. I repeatedly heard from attendees how nice it was to have 100% of a conference focused on an issue that typically receives only 10% of the attention. One of my favorite presentations was by Chris Blizzard from Mozilla showing of Firefox’s 3.5 Ogg Theora capabilities. Here’s a quick screen cast some of the capabilities Chris showed off at the conference:

On Saturday afternoon I gave a well packed luncheon presentation on Open Video, Metadata, and Creative Commons. You can download the slides from my presentation here.

Here’s a brief summary from Jane and Alex who attended on behalf of ccLearn:

ccLearn also attended the first ever Open Video Conference and had a blast. We think much of the OVC’s success is due to the fact that so much of it was relevant to openness in general that education naturally fit the bill. “Open Video in Education” especially blew us away by the diversity of forward thinking present in the room by both open education advocates and those with little to no experience with open educational resources (OER). Most everyone in the room, including the audience, were in agreement that open video and open technologies are essential to the future of education. The expressed concerns were more about how to convince the higher-ups at their institutions to see the light.

To reiterate, the session was not lacking in representation. Someone remarked how the variety of perspectives yielded a kind of “transformer panel.” From Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge University’s Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) who set the tone in the beginning by assuming that it is (or should be) apparent to everyone that CC BY is the best license for OER, Tiffiny Cheng (Participatory Culture Foundation) who highlighted Miro, the open source free high definition video player, to UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley, the panel was diverse but consistent in their view that open video for education is essential, that CC licenses for that video is a given, and that—to quote an audience member’s words—”You have to do more than just tape lectures.”

Finally, you can also watch most of the main hall sessions on the Livestream feed page for the OVC, though Flash is required. We’re assured these will be available in Theora in short order.

Great job OVC, we’re looking forward to the next one!

I'm at the Seed - Council on Competitiveness State of Innovation Summit. I was thinking about live blogging, but find that doing so makes it hard for me to think about what people are actually saying. There's a webcast if you're interested.

As far as conferences go, it's a good one. Rock stars on the stage (E.O. Wilson is a hero of mine) and interesting conversations about innovation.

But I'm frustrated, as I often am at "innovation" conferences. What follows is a bit of a rant directed less at this event, which as I said is a good one, but at the conversation I hear all the time about scientific innovation. There are three problems.

Problem 1: there's almost no conversation about the essential theories of emerging innovation - open, user-driven, distributed. This is about the new forms of innovation that the network enables, and should be on every agenda of every meeting that claims to talk about innovation. If we simply do things the old way, but bigger, we fail. Disruptive innovation models ought to be part of the conversation and they too often aren't.

Problem 2: there's no conversation about technical infrastructure for innovation. Here's what I mean by that: the internet is infrastructure for innovation in culture and commerce. It underpins an enormous amount of economic value, and from it emerges disruption that we could never have predicted, like the Web. And the web in turn begat Google, Amazon, Facebook, blogging, you name it. Both of these systems work this way because they are public systems. Yet we don't talk about an open public technical infrastructure for science. We build individual bits of it, but our vision is investing in unconnected nodes, not networks.

On top of this, there is the assumption that because the web works for culture, it works for science. But the Web is a system built for documents - it's infrastructure for documents. Science innovation depends on data. This conference had a great panel on data, with Ben Fry, who's a data visualization wizard. Yet no conversation that the infrastructure we have for the Web completely fails at data. Infrastructure for making the web function on data is woeful - format standards, annotation, and so on are always underfunded and first to cut in crisis.

Infrastructure for data integration, data federation, and so forth should be encoded directly into the open standards of the web and internet. Full stop. And we should talk about this problem more often. Otherwise people look at their iPhones, check for a latte, and assume this level of functionality scales from coffee to the bench. It doesn't.

Problem 3: there's no conversation about the way that our legal and policy regimes affect emerging modes of innovation. Data use is dependent on legal access to data. There's a range of data regimes across the world that make legal access to data conditional on rights being granted. Copyright licenses prevent innovative scientists from using software to index the literature and integrate it into the database world. Default settings on government policy create strong incentives for patenting smaller and smaller inventions by universities. Tenure and review systems encourage secrecy and withholding.

Taken together, these three problems represent the core "immune system" of science to disruptive change. That's not a terrible thing. Science should resist some disruptive changes. But right now, the disruptive change being resisted is the network. It's a terrible irony that at the moment we have the technical ability to send any content anywhere at almost no cost of distribution, we haven't got the technical and legal infrastructure to realize the potential of that ability for science. It's an even more terrible irony that the innovation resulting from that ability in culture is being constricted by the very policies and regimes we claim to promote innovation.

Read the comments on this post...

Fiona Murray (Associate Professor of Management Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group, Sloan School of Management, MIT) will focus on “Institutional foundations of scientific progress: implications for collaboration and participation”.
Today's knowledge is exchanged and accumulated within and across both formal and informal scientific institutions (libraries, journals, databases, etc.) that also include intellectual property rules and their licensing practices.
The way we choose to structure these institutions is critical in shaping collaboration and, more importantly, participation in scientific progress. Specifically, if access to knowledge is critical for full participation in scientific research, then the way we shape the rules of these institutions has profound implications for who participates and who is left behind.
The landscape of formal and informal institutions will determine whether innovation and knowledge production becomes truly democratized and is a much more robust and lasting mechanism for ensuring broad participation in science than simply mandating collaboration. There is a variety of quantitative evidence and research projects that do substantiate these claims, thus providing positive implications for scientific progress and the society at large.

Please click here for the Conference complete programme. [23june09]

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As anyone following this site closely must know, the Wikipedia community and Wikimedia Foundation board approved the adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license as the main content license for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. A post about the community vote has many links explaining the history and importance of this move.

Starting last week with English Wikipedia (there are over 700 Wikimedia sites in over 250 languages — the image to the right is sourced from one of them), the copyright notice on Wikimedia sites is being changed to CC BY-SA. See the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use.

The outreach effort to non-Wikimedia wikis to take advantage of this migration opportunity is ongoing. Help if you can. One very important milestone was reached June 19, when most wikis hosted by Wikia (there are thousands, including some big ones) converted to CC BY-SA.

Hooray for Jimmy Wales, founder of both Wikipedia and Wikia! (Note the two organizations are unrelated.) CC is fortunate to also have Wales as a member of our board of directors. Without his vision, this unification of free culture licensing would not have been possible.

Here’s to a huge win for Wikipedians, all of free culture, and everyone who made it possible! Already the licensing change is enabling content to flow between Wikipedia and other projects. Will you interoperate? See a post on my personal blog for a long-winded conjecture about long-term impacts of the licensing change.

Finally, note that this is only one instance of the Wikipedia community showing great foresight and leadership. For example, clearly the Wikipedia community’s steadfast commitment to open formats played a major role in giving open video (effectively meaning Theora) a chance for wide adoption, which it now appears on the verge of. Hooray for visionary free culture communities and many wins to come!

Addendum 2009-06-30

Erik Moeller writes on the Wikimedia Foundation blog that the licensing update has been rolled out on all Wikimedia wikis:

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

The next release of Ubuntu is only about 4 months away, but you have even less time to submit your best CC-licensed song, video, or photograph to be included on every Ubuntu install that goes to millions of users. The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an open competition for anyone interested to submit their work. The deadline, however, is July 16th, 2009.

At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture.

Above is the winning image for the last Free Culture Showcase. To see the other past winners, check out this page: Previous Free Culture Winners.

Good luck to all the participants and be sure to check out the Free Culture Showcase website when the winners are announced!

We’re very happy to note that the Free Software Foundation has introduced RDF for GNU licenses. This means the FSF has described each of its licenses at a high level in the same “machine readable” framework that CC uses to describe our licenses.

CC worked with the FSF to extend our vocabulary for describing copyright licenses in RDF, but it’s key to understand that no collaboration was required. They could have extended our vocabulary without asking or published their own without reference to ours, leaving it to third parties to describe mappings between the two (also using RDF). As with free software, using the semantic web means users have the freedom to innovate without asking for permission. Perhaps it is no surprise that cutting edge semantic web software tends to be free software. It feels like there may be under-exploited connections to be drawn between the free software and semantic web communities, e.g., hinted at in Evan Prodromou’s keynote at the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference, somewhat as it feels there may be under-exploited connections between the free software and free culture communities.

Less philosophically, we hope this small affordance helps others build tools which make it easier to find and use free software. For example, this list of free software hosting facilities is only the tip of the iceberg, and rapidly growing due to the rise of distributed version control systems. More project metadata will help computers help make sense of it all.

It’s also worth noting that RDF descriptions of licenses such as CC’s and now the FSF’s give users an additional tool to use to find and manage information, in contrast with Digital RightsRestrictions Management, which gives the publishers of information a tool to abuse users. For more on the latter, of course see the FSF’s Defective By Design campaign.

If you’re looking for excellent, brief, printable materials explaining various aspects of Creative Commons, check out CC Australia’s CC Infopacks. They’re also linked from our documentation wiki, and all licensed for remixing with your own course or other materials (of course).

Also congratulations to CC Australia project lead Brian Fitzgerald, Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse Museum, and former CC General Counsel Mia Garlick on their appointments to Australia’s Government 2.0 Taskforce.

To stay ahead of the curve, subscribe to CC Australia’s feed (note CC AU also spearheaded our case studies project) as well as those of other CC jurisdiction projects, which you can find aggregated on Planet Creative Commons.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald speaking at Public Sphere #2: Government 2.0: Policy and Practice by trib

Even though it’s only been a few hours since our last post, we thought it was worth posting this breaking news from Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere #2: Government 2.0: Policy and Practice.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, ccAustralia Project Lead, has been named as a member of a new Government 2.0 Taskforce launched at the event by Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner MP. According to its website, the Taskforce is “made up of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs from government, business, academia, and cultural institutions” who will advise the government on “increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information” and “encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.”

There are a few names on the taskforce that might be familiar to CCers - including Mia Garlick, Assistant Secretary for the Digital Economy branch at the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and former General Counsel for Creative Commons International, and Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse Museum, who is largely responsible for the museum being a leader in open access in Australia and internationally.

Hopefully, this taskforce will help to speed up the adoption of best practice open access and open democracy policies more widely in the Australian public sector.
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Senator Kate Lundy at Public Sphere #2: Government 2.0: Policy and Practice by trib

Even as we speak, Senator Kate Lundy is hosting the 2nd of her Public Sphere forums: Government 2.0: Policy and Practice. For those unfamiliar with Public Sphere, it’s an initiative by Senator Lundy’s office to provide online and offline spaces to facilitate discussion of topics of interest to both the general public and to the government. They’re using various different online technologies combined with offline forums, to try to provide the greatest opportunity for participation by people from around Australia. This week’s forum, which is being held at Parliament House in Canberra, focuses on, to quote the site, “how creating an even more participatory form of government in Australia will improve the effectiveness of public administration, enable communities to better help themselves, promote renewed engagement in the democratic process and enhance our capacity to respond to emerging complex social, geopolitical and environmental challenges”.

They have some great and prominent speakers, including CCau’s lead, Professor Brian Fitzgerald, and, judging by the Twitter feed (hashtag #publicsphere), there’s some lively debate going on. The whole event is being streamed live, and there’s an event wall with live Twitter, blog and Flickr streams.
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On Thursday last week, Aged Care Queensland launched their new eMentoring Handbook CD Rom, designed to assist aged care workers with training and mentoring advice and opportunities. Excitingly, they’ve published the entire resource under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence. This means the material on the CD Rom can be redistributed, remixed and repurposed.

The publication of a single CD Rom under a CC licence might not seem like a big step, but it’s one of the first examples Australia-wide of a community service organisation working at the ground level putting real time and thought into providing the most appropriate copyright policy for their resources. The licensing makes the CD Rom much more valuable to the community it is seeking to service. Not only can it be spread far and wide, aged care workers in the field can create customised versions for their regions, teachers and trainers can feel confident reproducing and distributing the information for their classes, and workers from other sectors can use it as the basis for eMentoring Handbooks relevant to their own workers. The whole licensing initiative is primarily due to Aged Care Queensland’s eMentoring Project Officer, Sarah Stewart - you can find her musings on the whole licensing process on her blog.
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Michela Ledwidge of the experimental production house, MOD Films, has been honoured with the Peter Rasmussen Innovation Award at this year’s Sydney Film Festival. Many in the CC community will know Michela from her CC-licensed film project, Sanctuary (pictured above), which was one of the first fully-remixable films launched internationally, and which was given specific mention by the Sydney Film Festival jury in grating the award. Michela spent last week hobnobbing with other innovators in film at the first Open Video Conference in New York. For more information, see MOD Film’s press release.
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Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer l'ouverture de la sixième édition des Qwartz Prix Internationaux des Musiques Nouvelles. Elle sera l’un des principaux vecteurs de la commémoration du centenaire de la naissance de Pierre Schaeffer.

Qwartz est un programme dédié a la promotion et au soutien de la création musicale indépendante, qui s’attache a la révéler au public et lui attribuer des dotations lors de la cérémonie qui clot chaque édition. La sélection se fait après une écoute a l’aveugle des œuvres par le jury, présidé cette année par Alejandro Jodorowsky. Les internautes sont ensuite invités a voter dans les différentes catégories sur le site des Qwartz. Les prix sont remis lors de la Cérémonie de Cloture le vendredi 2 avril 2010 au Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione.

Pour participer a la sixième édition des Qwartz, il vous faut vous inscrire avant le 15 juillet 2009 en nous envoyant a l'adresse registration6@qwartz.org vos coordonnées complètes (nom, prénom, statut, téléphone et adresse e-mail du responsable de l’inscription), le nom de(s) l'oeuvre(s) et de(s) l'artiste(s). Seules les oeuvres éditées entre le 1er janvier 2008 et le 15 juillet 2009 par des labels et artistes indépendants peuvent participer aux Qwartz 6.

Les oeuvres sont a envoyer a l'adresse suivante avant le 24 juillet 2009 : Qwartz / Association Pro/Art, 53-55 rue de la Fontaine au Roi F-75011 Paris. Elles doivent être accompagnées du règlement de participation complété et signé.

Contact: Clémence Seurat

Au palmarès des Qwartz 5:

• Qwartz d’Honneur pour l’Innovation décerné au Professeur Lawrence Lessig
• Urlaub auf Balkonien de krill.minima Thinner Netlabel http://www.thinner.cc/pages/releases/releases_detail.php?id=thn098 (oeuvre sous CC)
• Autumn Leaves Gruenrekorder http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=218 (oeuvre sous CC)

Under the title "Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions", the Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009 is scheduled for Sunday 28, Monday 29 & Tuesday 30 June 2009 in Torino, Italy.

The event will address the conceptual foundations and practical feasibilities of contractually constructed “commons” and related bottom-up public domain initiatives (joint policy guidelines, common standards, institutional policies, etc.) capable of offering shared access to a variety of research resources, identifying models, needs and opportunities for effective initiatives across a diverse range of research areas. [19june09]

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